ARM is a fragmented mess compared to x86. Switching to ARM (right now at least) means losing the ease of x86 booting. In the x86 world, trying another Linux distro is as simple as downloading it and putting it on a USB stick. You can be 95% certain it will work. In the ARM world, nothing is standardised, nothing will ever work first time.

There are projects trying to tackle it, but compared to x86 it's a fragmented mess. That's what we're losing with ARM laptops - universal computing.

One key frustration is it’s typically not possible to have an arm distribution that boots across most arm boards, because they have incompatible boot loaders. Ie you have a raspberry pi image and a banana pi image and an orange pi image and the rock pi S image that are all different from each other. There have been some attempts at UEFI on arm that would address this, but it’s nowhere near as consistent or compatible as on the x86 platform side.

People bought IBM clones to run the same software, not for the love of the architecture.

If ARM processors are regularly incompatible and segmented, we all lose out and end up in isolated silos.

A computer is much more than an CPU chip, e.g. "PC 99 System Design Guide", among several other references.